Will the Mars One reality TV mission ever take off? Doubt it!

New revelations cast serious doubt over whether the Mars One mission to put humans on the Red Planet will ever be achieved….and lets be honest with ourselves, this does seem a tad over the top and daft doesn’t it!? The getting people to Mars part isn’t ‘daft’ as this will happen one day, however, sending a group of people in what appears to be a huge marketing ploy, of which has already been confirmed that the volunteers may only survive for 68 days sounds a tad like some kind of Sci-fi/Horror film doesn’t it!?

And without meaning to sound mean, it also makes me wonder about what kind of people would want to have a ‘one way’ ticket to Mars, with a chance of not surviving much longer than a couple on months. If and its a big “IF” these volunteers see this mission as a ‘suicide mission’ and happy for the world to see them potentially ‘Die live’….would you really trust these type of people to be standing side by side next to you miles and miles away from home?! I definitely wouldn’t ! Yes I would love to visit Mars, but I’m sorry but I don’t want to die there after a couple of months….There is too much going on in life that want me to live quite a bit longer than that….

To be fair , it looks as if human colonisation of Mars might have to be put on hold anyway! New information about the Mars One mission, which originally launched in 2012 and claimed that it would put humans on the Red Planet by 2025 as part of a reality TV show, has actually exposed a series of fundamental flaws in the project.

Australian writer Elmo Keep, who spent a year researching Mars One and has since published her findings in a piece titled All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go, concludes that: “Mars One doesn’t appear to be in any way qualified to carry off the biggest, most complex, most audacious, and most dangerous exploration mission in all of human history.”

Mars One…..Mission Impossible!?

Mars One was launched by Dutch entrepeneur Bas Lansdorp in May 2012, with the following mission statement:

“Human settlement of Mars is the next giant leap for humankind. Exploring the solar system as a united humanity will bring us all closer together.”

Last month, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology revealed that any manned mission to Mars would result in the crew dying after 68 days.
But Keep’s report exposes yet more problems with Mars One:

1) Lansdorp claimed that the project would cost $6 billion – a figure, Keep explains, that is “tens if not hundreds of billions [of dollars] less than any manned Mars mission so far proposed by NASA.” Lansdorp bats these concerns away, however: “First, Mars One is a private organisation. We have no political obligations, which means we can just find the best supplier for the best price. In NASA they have a problem where if they do a mission like the Curiosity Rover, each component has to come from different states because each state contributes to NASA and they want their money back, basically. Mars One doesn’t have that problem.” The Mars One plan was to raise the necessary money through crowd-funding and advertising revenues but, at the time Keep’s piece was published, Mars One had received just $633,440 from donations, 0.01% of the $6 billion target. “Right now Mars One is receiving funding from investors, from donations from all over the world, and from small corporate sponsors that are helping us,” says Lansdorp. “We’re in negotiation with a few very large brands, if they’re interested in partnering with Mars One.”

2) Soon after the Mars One project was launched, the company claimed that over 200,000 people had applied for the one-way mission. However, it has now been revealed by the project’s chief medical adviser, Norbert Kraft, that he sorted through only 80,000 applications. There were only a further 2,782 video applications made directly to the Mars One website.

3) A space transport services company called SpaceX is listed on the Mars One website as one of the suppliers, with the statement: “Mars One anticipates using SpaceX Falcon Heavy, an upgraded version of the Falcon 9, which is in use by SpaceX currently. The Falcon Heavy is slated to undergo test flights in 2014, granting ample time for fine-tuning prior to the Mars One missions.” However, Keep discovered that SpaceX has no on-going contracts with the Mars One mission.

4) Without a space craft, there is no way that the final candidates can be chosen for the mission. Keep, who spoke to astronaut Chris Hadfield, explains: “If there are no specifications for the craft that will carry the crew, if you don’t know the very dimensions of the capsule they will be traveling in, you can’t begin to select the people who will be living and working inside of it.”

5) Mars One is underpinned by the idea that the application process, training regime and mission will form part of a reality TV show. Big Brother creators Endemol were confirmed as the partners when the Mars One project was launched but their PR director told Keep that “Things are at a very early stage and we’re not yet in a position to add anything further to what was detailed in the press release.” Added to this, there is currently no network buyer for the show.

6) Last but not least, the volunteers….are they truly willing to leave their families and DIE in ten years!? Ten years feels like a long way away at the moment, but it will soon come round! And is this ‘Humane’ viewing to send people who perhaps have no care for life to somewhere remote and alone to die….I don’t think so.

Two of the British Mars one Volunteers

U.I.P Summary

I hate to come across negative about anything to do with space travel, however, the way that this is being dressed up does appear a bit wishy washy and silly, in fact it feels as if we are being built up to some kind of false TV viewing! I may be wrong about this whole thing and if this does go ahead smoothly and the volunteers are given a decent life expectancy on Planet Mars, the guys who will have arranged all of this will deserve all of the credit they can get….but in the meantime, I suggest they present this whole project in a far more serious/scientific light because at the moment it appears more like Mars ‘DONE’ opposed to Mars ‘ONE’

But who knows…..perhaps the conspiracies out there are right, and people are already on Mars and the planet is currently being terraformed! Nothing would surprise us here at U.I.P nowadays!